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Auto Enrolment: Postponement

Postponement allows you to delay when an employee is enrolled in to the company Auto Enrolment scheme.

Additionally, using staging postponement can help relieve the need to do complicated and time-consuming pro-rata calculations when employees are first enrolled. Auto enrolment postponement settings can be found in ‘Company’ > ‘Company Maintenance’ under both the ‘AE Postponement’ and the ‘EJ Postponement’ tabs.

Postponement on Staging

The main type of postponement is the type applied at the staging date, this can be set under ‘Company’ > ‘Company Maintenance’ > ‘AE Postponement’. You can postpone the pension by a maximum of 3 months.

It is advised that you do postpone for at least 1 month. If your staging date (which will be the 1st of a given month) is not the same as your payslip date (for example the 20th of the month) then your first calculation for pension contributions will have to be done on a pro rata basis. This means that you will have to do a manual calculation for the first payment.

If you have set the ‘PRP alignment‘ option in ‘Company Maintenance > Pension‘ then by postponing for 1 month you include the pro-rata period between the payslip date and your staging date into the applied postponement. This means that you will not have to do any pro rata calculations.

The reason the software does not take care of this pro rata calculation is because different employers have different formats for calculating this value.

Postponement on Start of New Employment

If you want you can set postponement for any new employees joining the company. This means that when any new employees join the company, you can postpone them joining the pension by a maximum of 3 months (if monthly paid). This can help with you not having to make pension contributions for employees who come and go quickly or until they’ve passed a 3 month probationary period for example.

Eligible Jobholder Postponement

If you want you can set the postponement for people who become eligible jobholders. This means that when an employee becomes an eligible jobholder (they are earning enough to be automatically enrolled onto your auto enrolment scheme), you can postpone them joining the pension by a maximum of 3 months (if monthly paid).

This avoids assessing and enrolling employees who start and finish their employment quickly. This is also ideal for employees who have fluctuating pay in some periods and may only be above the threshold for 1 period (if they have a bonus for example).

If you did not apply eligible jobholder postponement, then when an employee earns over the threshold they will be enrolled onto the auto enrolment scheme even if they are only earning that much money for one period.

This can be set under ‘Company’ > ‘Company Maintenance’ > ‘EJ Postponement’